darkplaces in Debian out-dated by a good three years and Nexuiz Classic abandoned since 2010

[Markus Koschany]

Am 15.08.2017 um 03:34 schrieb Thomas DEBESSE:
> Hi, there was some talks some years ago about that topic there:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=646377
> 
> But there was some problems with the directions it taken, they
> notably tried to also rebuild the non-code stuff (like map .bsp), which
> is a process that takes a very long time, from 30 minutes to 6 hours per
> map, meaning the whole build of the 27 maps can last days. Any effort
> like that can lead easily to overwork, this kindof deadly perfectionism
> makes people exhausted and likely to abandon the project. So much waste
> of time and effort only to produces non-code files that will have
> different checksum with the ones hosted by servers!…

Building the game data from source was not the blocker back then. It is
certainly an important part of any game development that you are able to
reproduce the same steps as upstream to create game content. Otherwise
nobody will be able to modify it in the future. Thus said it appears to
me that all tools to create this game content are available somewhere
even if that means a loss of quality. The issue is that all pk3 files
must have the same hashsums or multiplayer gaming won't work. Hence we
have to provide the exact same data files as upstream. We already do
this for other games, so it shouldn't be an issue. If you check
ufoai-maps you will also find that it is perfectly possible to compile
game data from source even if it takes hours.

> Also, the whole thread makes some wrong assumptions based on Nexuiz
> needs without further check, like the assumption about the need for
> FTEQCC to compile the game code. But Xonotic ditched FTEQCC long time
> ago in favor of GMQCC if I remember correctly. So, to be successful, a
> Xonotic packaging effort for Debian must rethink some directions that
> were taken before (and were going nowhere).

Later in this thread it is clarified that GMQCC is needed to compile
Xonotic. The main issue is that nobody has been willing to maintain the
package for Debian which means doing regular updates of the package and
forwarding bug reports and patches to upstream. People regularly
complain about the absence of Xonotic from Debian but nobody is willing
to help out.

Markus


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